Safecracker Part 2 - The Little Whinging Burglaries
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: Part Two of the saga. There is is a burglar in Little Whinging, a burglar who is coming and going. Harry's burgeoning career is taking off, unfortunately he is about to come face to face with his past since his magic has been detected. Will he survive?
1. Chapter 1

I don't own Harry Potter.

Please let me know what you think.

* * *

Safecracker.

The Little Whinging Burglaries.

A smirk was threatening to cross Harry's face as he stared at the mesmerised woman in front of him. "You have received your orders, repeat them," the boy said to her.

In a calm voice, the woman recited. "I am to leave my jewellery in a plastic bag outside the front door nestled in the flower bed in two days time," the woman said.

"Good, very good," Harry said, nodding. "When will you put the bag outside?"

"I will put the bag outside during my washing up night," the woman said. "My husband and two sons will be watching the television during that time. I am to place the bag underneath the right front wheel of my car."

"Yes," Harry said, satisfied while he was struggling hard to once again hide the urge to smirk or grin, afraid if he did the woman would snap out of her hypnotic trance. Harry had little love for anyone in Little Whinging, especially in Privet Drive since the Dursleys had spent years calling him a delinquent while at the same time they shamelessly spread lies and innuendos about his dead parents. While he was sure most of it was an exaggeration, there was still so much he didn't know about his parents. Harry was tempted to hypnotise Aunt Petunia to give him the full story and he didn't care how long it took him to get the full story.

Harry had been spending the last month or so gaining experience with committing small burglaries, just to get the hang of the experience of theft. The woman in front of Harry was one of those people who Uncle Vernon sold him to. His uncle believed he was "_finally earning his keep," _or something along those lines.

Okay, most of the neighbours treated him better than most. Although quite a few people were so similar to the Dursleys it was not funny. Those idiots believed Harry to be deserving of what was going on, but in Harry's mind, he was getting his real payment. The Dursleys received a nice little profit off of him occasionally whenever they sold him to others to work on the street.

It was funny, in Harry's mind, those books in the school library talked about slavery and other evil concepts, yet it was a lie. A shameless lie. So many people said that slavery was banned, that it was evil. But truthfully the people on this street loved making him a slave.

So did he feel bad about this?

No, not really.

He didn't care about the pain inflicted on the people he stole, especially from this woman; her husband and her loved telling him he was a delinquent, and her sons were no better.

_Oh yeah, that reminds me…._Harry thought maliciously. "Mrs -," he began, using her last name, "you will eventually discover your jewellery has been stolen. This is what you will do-," he gave her some fresh instructions before he finished. "Do you understand your instructions?"

"Yes."

"Good," Harry smiled, and he lifted his fingers. "When I click my fingers, you will remember nothing about your instructions, until seven pm two days from now. You will tell my uncle I did my chores. You will give him money as usual, but besides that, your entire manner will be the same. Understood?"

"Yes."

Harry lifted his hand and he clicked his fingers.

XXX

Sneaking out of Number 4 was incredibly easy, but since Harry had some practice already, it wasn't difficult for him to get out of the house while the Dursleys were asleep. For good measure, Harry had used the same mass hypnotism method he'd been experimenting with recently on them. As he walked slowly towards the house he was due to be at, Harry had time to think.

There was no need to hurry, and since he was using his mass hypnotism skill on the rest of the street, he wasn't really afraid of anyone finding him and returning him to the Dursleys.

It was funny. This time last year he had would have been trapped inside Number 4. Now, he was free to come and go as he pleased, with no-one to interfere. Now, he was building up a nice little fortune, readying himself for the day where he would finally escape from the Dursleys.

As he made his way to the house, and the car where the latest treasure hoard was waiting for him, Harry knew he needed to look at everything in the long-term. Harry had a small but growing fortune back in the cupboard under the stairs, and while he knew he could find refuge in London somewhere, he had begun looking into the possibility of migrating to somewhere else to make his new home, somewhere where the Dursleys would never find him.

He had already begun researching the possibilities.

He had considered the Isle of Wight. It was an island, separated by a relatively small expanse of water, but it was like the moat surrounding a castle. And it was very unlikely the Dursleys would think to look for him there.

Harry was tempted to travel to Brighton, or the general area of East Sussex he had studied in the school library. He didn't have all the information, but the general area looked promising. In any case, he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to go to London; while the city was dense and it was highly unlikely the Dursleys would ever think to look for him there, with the many streets, and the London Underground, he didn't want to be near crowds.

Harry had considered simply turning his eyes up north, to York, Manchester, Liverpool, or Newcastle, or even to Scotland, but he had decided to simply remain close to London. In any case, what was the point of going up north? He needed to think slowly rather than quickly. All he knew was in a short time from now, perhaps a year, or six months if he found some early gains and quickly, and carefully consolidated, them.

At last Harry came to the house, and after he had dug around the car, he found the plastic bag full of jewellery. Harry dug his hand into the bag, and let his fingers examine the collection within. Harry straightened up and looked around cautiously before he made his way back to Number 4.

XXX

The Death Eater couldn't believe his luck. For a long time, he and some of his fellow Death Eaters had been trying to find the so-called Boy who Lived in the muggle world for a good few years. But thanks to some of his contacts in the Ministry who were still corrupt and had missed the purge Crouch senior had started but never finished since Barty Crouch Junior had embarrassed the bastard, and Bagnold had been replaced by Fudge who had simply pushed the whole war under the rug while Dumbledore had let it happen, the Death Eater had managed to get a fix on the basic whereabouts of the elusive hero Dumbledore had placed on a pedestal.

It had needed a good few days before he had the basic location. If he was lucky, then he would have at last find the location of Harry Potter, and when the Dark Lord returned, he and some of his friends who'd lead the attack and kill the little blood traitor would gain great rewards.

But the Death Eater was puzzled.

He had been trying to find the Boy who Lived for some time - he had opted to conduct his search during the night so then he could magically scan and sweep each house to find out if any of them were warded with the type of spells Dumbledore would think of, but also so then he wouldn't need to worry about muggles spotting him even if he wasn't worried about killing them, he needed this to be quick and quiet at the same time - and so he was quite surprised when he saw a small boy moving through the streets completely by himself. He was so surprised he barely even had the time needed to throw up a notice-me-not charm over himself so he wouldn't be seen. It was too dark for the Death Eater to see his current clothes, but from what he could see, the boy looked exactly like his blood traitor father.

Why was he bending down near that stupid muggle contraption? The Death Eater became even more puzzled when he saw the boy actually stick his arm underneath the machine. What was he taking out from underneath it? He couldn't exactly see it, but the Death Eater could see something in the Boy's hand.

When he saw Harry Potter walk off down the street, the Death Eater hurried after him so he could see for himself which house he went into. _Who would have believed it? _the Death Eater asked himself. _The Boy Who Lived is going to help me with his downfall…_

XXX

_Something's wrong….Someone is following me, _Harry thought to himself as he slowly walked back to Privet Drive.

He had been hearing the sounds of scuff marks behind him, and the more he heard, the more worried he was becoming. How could anyone have gotten past his mass-hypnotism spell so easily?

Harry swung around and gaped.

Behind him, startled, was a man wearing a long black dress, like a cloak.

"Who are you? What do you want?" the boy asked, trying to master his panic.

The man sneered. "I want you, Potter," he spat.

"Why? If I took something from you, you can have it back," Harry hoped that was the case at least, but he was shaken by this encounter, stunned it was relatively so easy.

"What?" the man gaped.

Harry was surprised. He had assumed this guy was angry with him for burglary, but now he could see him clearly he saw this man was not from around here. "Never mind. What do you want?" he asked.

The man snickered. "You don't know?"

"Know what?" Harry asked, feeling his temper starting to fray.

The man laughed and he slipped something out of his pocket and levelled it at Harrys' face.

"I'm going to finish the job, and end your life, Potter." He threatened.

Suddenly Harry decided enough was enough, so he lifted out his hand, willing his power to break the man's arms while at the same time keeping him very quiet. When the man's mouth was open, tears streaming silently down his face, Harry mentally willed the man's legs to be crushed at the knee. Harry bent down and took the man's head into his hands. "Look into my eyes," he commanded, pushing his power into the man's mind to bring him under control. "The pain is nothing. It can be controlled, it will be controlled. You will pretend it isn't there."

As he spoke, the man's eyes became more glazed until he was fully underneath Harry's control.

Harry removed the silencer from the man so they could speak. "Who are you?"

"George Ivybush."

"Why did you come for me?"

"You vanquished the Dark Lord. Me and several of my fellow Death Eaters planned to find you and to kill you to avenge his loss."

Harry licked his lips as he wondered what the hell was going on. "Who is this Dark Lord? What are you talking about?"

For the next half an hour, Harry was stunned when he learnt the truth of his parents' murders. How his parents were magical, how his mother was a muggle-born witch, and his dad was a pureblooded wizard. How Harry himself was a wizard. The boy was surprised as he heard about the war between the so-called light and dark, how this Voldemort wanted to rule the magical world. It sounded like something out of a Lord of the Ring's novel, but it was the truth as he hypnotised the Death Eater.

But as the story progressed, Harry was at a loss to decide what was going to happen to the Death Eater. He had admitted he had been planning on finding Harry Potter, him, and then leading a gang of his pals around to kill him just to find favour with Voldemort himself.

Harry probed the Death Eater thoroughly to find out exactly when the attack was meant to happen. The Death Eater's reply was vague since he was not the only one to be out there hunting for him, but the idea of a group hunting him down for something that took place when he was just a baby…it filled him with dread, and it worried him because now he knew the source of his powers. He had never considered it to be actual, literal magic, especially after so many years of being conditioned by the Dursleys.

The thought of his relatives made him realise something.

They must have known the truth about his parents, but he had plans to find out what they planned to do. He didn't doubt for one moment the Dursleys would try to stop him from going to the school the Death Eater had mentioned, Hogwarts. They wouldn't be doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. No, they would be doing it for their own gains.

Harry closed his eyes for a moment so he could think, but he found he couldn't; he had so much information flowing in and out of his mind, and he couldn't concentrate clearly. He would need time to assimilate everything he had just learnt, and that was the scary part in his mind. Harry looked down at the Death Eater, wondering what he was going to do with him.

Harry knew he was within his right to kill the man for what he had been planning on doing, but he knew he couldn't. If he killed the man then his friends would work out where the deed had been done. Harry sighed and he used his power - his _magic _\- to heal the Death Eater's wounds, delicately.

He had a lot of work to do to the man's memory as well, and he wasn't looking forward to it.


	2. Chapter 2

Safecracker.

After the meeting with the Death Eater, Harry was deeply shaken by the encounter with a man, a _wizard, _who was part of a mob of other wizards who wanted to kill him. While he had sent the Death Eater away with his memory wiped, so then the others would just assume it was another muggle-born, although Harry had to hope the Death Eater's programming when it kicked in properly when he met with the others, they would prefer going after him since he was more attractive and more tempting a target.

It would probably not last long.

At some point, the Death Eaters would find out about the deception, although if the Death Eater he'd met paid the price, well Harry wouldn't be bothered about it. He was more interested in what this latest discovery meant for his long-term plans. Harry had hoped to spend some time building up a small fortune out of the people of Little Whinging before he left, but now it looked like he wouldn't have too long before someone came from the magical world he had learnt about and discovered him. Harry thought about the matter for a good few days, and he was so spooked by the Death Eater's presence recently, he didn't go out and burgle anyone.

Speaking of burglaries the police were going around, knocking on doors and asking questions. Harry had deliberately kept the burglaries away from Privet Drive itself because he knew if the police did turn up, they might discover his little stash. The Dursleys might never bother to search his cupboard, but he had no doubt in his mind the police wouldn't mind taking a little peek although he had no idea what the police would do to him if they discovered what he had been doing. Personally, if there was such a thing as a kid's jail, Harry doubted it would be as bad as what he had to cope with since he already lived in a prison.

Harry decided the only person he could ask was his aunt. There was no doubt in his mind the woman would just not know anything about the truth of his parents. Harry decided to wait until Dudley was taken to the cinema as some kind of treat his father had promised for him, although what his pig of a cousin had done to deserve it in the first place, Harry neither knew nor cared. But if this was just yet another stupid attempt to bring down Harry's own morale, well it wasn't working since he had a lot more on his mind at this point than some stupid film.

The moment the door was closed, Aunt Petunia glared down at him. "Well, what are you daydreaming about now, Boy? Start hoovering the living room! It won't get done on its own!"

"There is plenty of time for that," Harry said, pinning his aunt with his green eyes as he pushed his magic at her, already dreaming up ways of getting into the magical world after he had prised some of the knowledge out of the Death Eater he'd interrogated so he could get hold of some of the information about the magical mind arts, to make his abilities stronger. "Look into my eyes."

Aunt Petunia's pinched face went slack and she fell under his spell.

"That's better. We're going into the living room for a few minutes, Aunt Petunia. And then we will have much to talk about. But first," Harry paused as a thought occurred to him, "when will Dudley and your husband get back?"

"The movie will last for three hours," Petunia answered promptly in an emotionless flat voice.

"Good," Harry smiled for the first time. "Wait for me in the living room, Aunt Petunia. Stand near your armchair until I tell you otherwise."

"Yes."

Aunt Petunia left Harry standing in the hallway while the Boy went to his cupboard, and brought out a ream of paper and a pen to make notes with.

He went back inside the living room and he gestured for his aunt to sit down.

"Sit down, Aunt Petunia," Harry said. "We have a lot to talk about."

Aunt Petunia sat down.

"Tell me the truth; does magic exist?"

"Yes."

Harry closed his eyes for a second, nodding as his aunt confirmed his suspicion. "So my mother and father had magic?"

"Yes."

"And I have magic?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me? What did you hope to gain by keeping the truth away from me"

"Magic is abnormal. My mother and father were proud of the day my sister got her first Hogwarts letter. But Lily had already known about magic since we lived in a town with another wizard. He told Lily about her powers when he saw her perform it. When you came to us, Vernon and I wanted to keep you away from that world because we could not bear the thought of another wizard in our lives."

"Who was this wizard?"

"His name is Severus Snape."

Harry filed that information away for the time being. "What does Vernon have against magic?"

"Vernon hates anything different. Your father and his best friend played pranks on him."

"I can see why that wouldn't help," Harry muttered to himself. "If you hate magic so much, why take me in? Why not take me to a foster home, and forget I had ever existed?"

"Vernon wanted to, but you had been left on our doorstep with a letter. The wizard who wrote it threatened us into taking you in," Aunt Petunia said, but Harry knew if his aunt had been speaking normally, he would have gotten an earful by now, each word spat out with nothing but venomous spite, so he was happy Petunia was speaking in an emotionless manner.

He also couldn't help but wince at the thought of a wizard threatening his relatives since it gave them another excuse to hate him.

"What did this wizard write in his letter to you?" Harry moved on.

Petunia spent a few minutes laying it all down for Harry; this time he got another account of how his parents had been murdered, only this time his aunt gave him a rundown of the protection this wizard _Albus Dumbledore _had described in vague terms. However, the one thing Harry was truly worried about the most was one line that Petunia remembered the most despite having only a basic recollection of what else was contained in the letter since the Dursleys had burnt it completely.

_Raise him how you think best. _

Why would Petunia remember that line so well?

Something wasn't quite right, but Harry decided to just leave it all at that for the time being. He had one question on his mind. The one billion dollar question of them all, and the one thing he had wanted to find out for a long time.

"Why did you treat me so badly?" Harry asked. "What did you plan to do with me?"

"You are a freak. You are abnormal," Aunt Petunia replied; once more Harry was certain if the woman had been speaking to him normally about this topic, he would be hearing nothing but venomous spite. "My mother and my father were both happy with Lily, my perfect sister, when she got her first letter from Hogwarts. I got nothing. I contacted the Headmaster of the school, the same wizard who sent that letter with you. He told me he couldn't have me at Hogwarts because I am not a witch."

_Is that one of the reasons why my aunt hates me? She's so jealous my mother has a talent she lacks, she decided to lash out? _As much as he hated her, Harry could not help but find it within himself to pity his aunt. At the same time, Harry was surprised; why would a headmaster of a school place a baby on a doorstep when it was freezing cold outside?

The pity faded completely in a puff of smoke when Petunia opened her mouth again. "Vernon and I decided to completely keep you from Hogwarts. Vernon discovered an article in a magazine, of how a group of priests had kept a psychic who heard voices locked up in a cell. They barely fed the woman and they beat her badly until she could not hear another voice again. They made her normal. Vernon decided to use that same method on you, convinced we would get the freakish magic out of you. Once that worked, you would be sent to Stonewall High. While you were there, we hoped the magical world would forget about you, and when you graduated, you would be thrown out onto the streets where you would have either died or become a drug addict. I would have gotten my revenge on my sister, for having something I wanted."

Harry wanted to kill her. He wanted to murder her in the most disgustingly painful way possible. Indeed, he lifted his hand to perform the deed, but he quickly stopped.

Petunia Dursley may have been a disgusting woman, with disgusting and disturbing ideas about what she had planned to do with him. But she was the only blood family he had in the world, that he knew of although he made a mental note to do some research into the matter to find out if it was so. For a moment, he wondered if his maternal grandparents were still alive; Petunia and Vernon never spoke about them, but he decided to research it later, preferably when he was in a less dangerous mood than the one he was in right now.

"How do you know this _stupid_ plan would have worked?" Harry asked. "How do you know you would have beaten the freakishness out of me? What if it didn't work?"

"We would have simply refused to let you go to Hogwarts."

Harry wasn't so sure about that as he started to think about it, especially since the Headmaster of the school had gone to a lot of trouble to ensure he stayed with the Dursleys. Harry rubbed his face thoughtfully, wondering what he could do now. He looked down at the notes he had taken, and he realised there were still some questions he wanted answering before Vernon and Dudley got back. He wanted the two obese idiots to believe everything was completely normal, but most of all he wanted the peace and quiet to think about what he was going to do.

"Aunt Petunia, how much do you know of the magical world?"

XXX

"Get to your cupboard where you belong, Boy! Vernon barked at Harry hours later after he and Dudley had come back to the spotless house after spending some enjoyable time at the cinema. He had come back in a good mood, only it was quickly soured by the sight of his nephew.

Harry silently retreated to the cupboard, only to be pushed by Dudley, who laughed at him.

Harry just rolled his eyes, thankful for the cupboard even if he absolutely hated it and the cramped confines.

But as he sat there, he went over the notes he had taken while Petunia was under his control. He had a lot to think about.


End file.
